Conventional methods for delivering advertisement data typically involve broadcasting messages to mass markets. This is usually described as a “Spray and Pray” approach, wherein the advertisement data is delivered to a wide audience and it is hoped that the advertisement data will be received by a sufficient number of potential recipients that are appropriate targets of the advertisement. Although an advertiser may take steps to ensure that the advertisement data is delivered via channels that traditionally are expected to reach a significant concentration of potential recipients, there is nevertheless little or no means to guarantee that the advertisement data is delivered to most appropriate recipients. An example of conventional mass marketing strategy is delivery of advertisement data through television channels and inclusion of the advertising data into commonly visited Internet websites.
Direct mailing campaigns via traditional mail and via electronic mail are considered to be more accurate in delivering advertisement information to targeted individuals and/or groups. In addition to the conventional electronic mail it is possible to use other electronic message delivery means for delivery of advertisement data, for example SMS-messages (Short Message Service) or MMS-messages (Multi Media Service) that can be delivered via a mobile communication network. Sending advertisement messages to recipients via a mobile communication network in a large scale causes often a lot of situations in which a certain advertisement message is received by an individual that is far from an optimal target for that advertisement message. For example, a message advertising large cars such as suburban vehicles (SUV) may be received by an environmentally conscious person that has adopted an attitude of hostility to such cars. In order to avoid situations of the kind described above or at least to minimise the amount of such situations there is a need to profile the recipients in such a manner that advertisement messages can be targeted to suitable recipients.
The profiling of the recipients can be based on answers given by the recipients to questions that have been delivered to the recipients e.g. via a communication network. Furthermore, the profiling can be based on demographic data related to the recipients. The answers to the questions and possibly also the demographic data constitutes raw data with the aid of which the recipients are categorised. In a situation in which there is only one question or only a few questions, the profiling may be too coarse or, in some cases, even misleading. For example, a question may be “Do you think the environment is important: Yes/No?”. Most of the people would answer “Yes” to this question albeit their actions and/or attitudes do not support that because the answer “No” would indicate exceptional egomania. From the advertisement point of view this “Yes” answer would lead to addressing ecologically friendly products to such recipients who would actually, for example, drive a SUV with a large consumption of gas and/or practise other behaviour that is far from environmental. In a situation in which there are a large number of questions, the number of different answer combinations gets high. For example, if there are N questions each of which having M answer-alternatives, the number of different answer combinations is MN. From the viewpoint of practical needs, the number of different recipient categories into which the recipients will be profiled has to be substantially smaller than the number of different answer combinations (MN). Therefore, the different answer combinations have to be mapped to a lower number of recipient categories in a manner that provides a sufficiently veracious profiling of the recipients.